Market researcher Forrester Research investigated the suitability of database systems for enterprise deployment and found that the Ingres and MySQl alternatives take the lead positions after IBM, Oracle and Microsoft.

The Forrester study has the market giants IBM, Microsoft and Oracle with 88% of the share in enterprise databases. They found their lead to be due mainly to high performance, availability and scalability.

Second place finishers were cost beneficial offerings from Computer Associates, Software AG and Sybase. Current competition also comes from IBM Informatix and open source products Ingres and MySQL, which Forrester considers appropriate for the small to medium size enterprise market.

The U.S. marketing firm praises Ingres as the open source database with the best enterprise features, even when it isn't the best known. Its optimal deployment is for less than 1 TByte databases with maximum a thousand concurrent users. Unfortunately only a few ready-made applications have Ingres.

The study has MySQL with open-minded features, even compared to the proprietary products. Forrester also points to its large user community. MySQL works best for databases up to 1 TByte. Many applications support the open source database, although some important ones such as Peoplesoft, SAP and Siebel still do not.

In comparison, PostgreSQL might have the largest developer community, but has hardly any distribution among vendors. In Forrester's view it lacks the availability, security and performance qualities of enterprise class databases.

The market firm based their study on 150 criteria and a sample of 21 manufacturers and corporate clients. The study is available as a free 25-page PDF after registration at Ingres. Forrester Research claims that the study is independent of, and was not commissioned by, Ingres.

Comments

changes in opinion

Funny, in my own current research and before this Forrester Article, I would have placed PostGresql at the top. In fact in 2006 this same author did just that.

See "PostGres Leads in Opne Source databases" Forrester Wave 2006.

IBM has placed confidence in EnterpriseDB skills for Oracle migration. So what gives ?

Just another comparison paid....

Edwin Quijada

This study make me laugh. The person who did it never in his life use PostgreSQL. Say that Mysql is the lead is so weird when Mysql has future doesnt known. I dont agree with this because really it doesnt represent the reality.

Sounds like B.S. to me...

John

Agreed. This result is contrary to my experience and every other product selection study I have read. I view these findings with great skepticism.

Apparently a financed article

Thomas

The author apparently has never used PostgreSQL otherwise he'd know that Postgres beats MySQL any time especially when it comes to transactions. When using MySQL as a flat file system (which seems to be the major usage) then of course it's faster. But who would use a (real) RDMS and abondon transactional safety and data integrity?